Kernel of Love
by GeronimoJenkins
Summary: For some people, there's plenty of fish in the sea. For operating systems, well, their options are a bit more limited. Drama and stuff happens. Will Windows get back together with Linux? Probably not.
1. Rivalry

Kernel of Love

Chapter 1: Rivalry

^C- Windows /

It was always the same, him and I. I'd get flashier, he'd get Flash support. I'd get new hardware support,  
he'd get Garageband preloaded and free.

Freaking GARAGEBAND.

It's kind of routine by now. I haven't had to work as hard these days, you know, with the 80% market share  
and all. I run anything and everything, everyone's used to me and for all the extra money I rape out of  
customers for not including Office on a clean install (which is actually an antitrust legal issue, don't  
look at me), I'm still cheaper than Macs on average. And it feels good.

There's a lot less... I don't know... urgency. It's not an innovate-or-die world anymore. Things are kinda  
stable. And even though Mac is slowly creepy up in popularity, it's awhile before I have to worry about  
anything yet.

But there's kind of another side to it. It's lonely. Me and Linux used to be a thing, back in the old days  
when terminals were terminals and dual-booting still had a bit of spark and freshness to it. She was a  
nice girl, but a bit of a hippie sometimes. She always had a bit of an issue with my size - no pun  
intended. Always trying to change the world instead of making it run. She was lean, aggressive, a bit  
abrasive to people who didn't know her yet. I loved her.

Those were the good old days. I wish we'd broken up on better terms. I remember the last thing she said  
before she broke the news, about how she needed to "find my own way... I need to be my own operating  
system. I can't just piggyback on you anymore, it's not fair to either of us." I took it badly, hell, where  
do you think PowerShell came from? Pretty pathetic as far as revenge, but at least I didn't try to  
"rm -r /" her behind her back. That was just low - and I got lucky there's such a difference between batch  
commands and bash commands. I blocked her IP address before she could Google the "format" command.

So yeah, we were both petty and emotional. What can I say? We were young! We didn't know what we were doing  
and were too arrogant to admit it. And while we're probably never going to be on speaking terms again, and  
certainly not SSHing terms, I'll still always look back fondly on the long nights pinging each other again  
and again and again. She loved latency (long as she wasn't drowning in it), and not a lot of girls are  
into that.

Ohhhh, Linux.

I need to stop thinking about her. Every time I let my mind wander to the way she made me feel, I know deep  
in my system32 that I'm just torturing myself. Bachelorhood isn't nearly as great as bachelors like to  
pretend it is. That's just a convenient lie to help us feel better about revving up our own Dr. Watsons  
to tech blogs. It's not fulfilling, it's not really freedom, and I am LONELY ENOUGH TO RAM AN AMIGA.

I'm... I'm sorry. It's just so frustrating. There's no fish in the ocean, because the ocean is a puddle. A  
tiny little puddle that's drying up in the sun. Chrome OS is so underage it creeps me out to think about  
even thinking about dating her... Linux and I are so far into the not-happening territory it's tragic, and  
I am so not banging her dad UNIX either. But that just leaves Mac, and he's a smug, sleak bastard.

I hate this, I hate him. Everything sucks and I'm gonna get chipping wasted.

^C- Mac /

You know, life is really bizarre sometimes. And sad. Like today, when I got drunk-dialed. Apparently  
Windows wasn't just drunk, either, he was mixing screensavers and smilies, which I've specifically told him  
on multiple occasions *not to do.* Not that it would stop him, but for such a massive, bloated piece of  
oldware he is a complete lightweight, so you'd think he'd learn not to overdo it on the hard stuff.

I mean, you feel sorry for him, but at the same time you know he knows better, so there's a little bit of  
a vindictive "that's what you get" feeling to it. And it's not like I don't have plenty to hate him for.

We've been fighting since we were kids. He actually stole most of what made him popular - the graphical  
display of files and folders, the windowing paradigm altogether - from me. Tweaked it just enough not to  
look completely derivative, of course, but it was my ideas that turned him into the reclusive, arrogant  
businessman he is today.

So I wish I could say I hate him, but he's so pathetic. He's a screenaholic, a workaholic, bitter over his  
breakup with Linux (not that he gets out enough for me to know from personal experience, but Linux was  
pretty vocal about the whole thing afterwards, so even though it's all skewed to her point of view, we  
basically all know what happened). He has no friends, he's getting old, and no matter what he does, people  
still rightfully hate Internet Explorer. He gets loaded with crapware by every dealer with no way to stop  
them, and the antitrust lawsuits against him basically add up to one big, offensive restraining order.

At some point it stops being funny and he starts being someone you feel sympathetic towards. I've got a  
long way to go, but I'm pretty much destined to take his place at the pinnacle of computing withing ten  
years if he doesn't get his act together. After Longhorn fell through, he basically proved he was no longer  
capable of taking care of himself, and ain't no one gonna do that for him, pardner.

So when he calls you a child-stealing, flashy gigolo, with a drunken slur and occasional bandwidth hiccup,  
you don't take it seriously. It's just Windows taking out his anger on the world in his helpless,  
belligerent way. But today, I finally realized that he's not just angry anymore. He's jealous. Of ME.

I admit that once I figured out I was being drunk-dialed, I basically tuned him out and let him rage and  
ramble as much as he wanted, and ended up missing a lot of the conversation. Which is why it took me awhile  
to notice that he'd quieted down, and was complaining about how I get all the chicks nowadays. Which is  
completely not true since the only action I've ever got was a short rebound relationship with Linux after  
she and Windows broke up. Now, she's millitaristically celibate (although there's few things she does  
otherwise, these days), which means I'm out in the cold, like everyone else.

But he really got my attention when he said he was going to fragment his own boot sector - split a  
partition straight through the middle and let the filesystem refracture, then shut down forever. I mean, I  
am not Windows' friend, don't get me wrong. But sales boost or not, you don't ignore this kind of thing -  
that's just wrong. Like any sane person, I tried to talk him out of it, but I'm really not good at this  
sort of thing. I think I was too obviously patronizing, I'm kinda bad about that. But it became pretty  
obvious that fixing this over a TCP connection simply wasn't gonna work.

That's how it all started. I just decided, right then and there, that I was going to Windows' place and  
talk some sense into him. Smack into him, if I had to, but letting him kill himself is basically murder.  
Even though we basically live next door (the trip from Cupertino to Redmond is pretty fast since both  
places have a ridiculous amount of bandwidth capacity), we don't really visit each other much. So I'm  
leaving now, and Jobs only knows what I'm going to find there. But whatever it is, I hope I can handle it.

May it never be said that I'm a killer.


	2. Vulnerability

Kernel of Love

Chapter 2: Vulnerability

^C- Mac /

I was pretty relieved when I got to Window's place. He'd fallen into a drunken stupor, mumbling repeatedly  
in his sleep, "A program needs your permission to continue... a program needs your permission to  
continue..." So, for now at least, things weren't looking so bad. We'd dodged a bullet. I had dodged a  
bullet.

I sat down on the bed, adjusting his spreadsheets so he'd be a bit more comfortable. He looked so... how  
can I put this... peaceful. Like all his processes were just shoved to the background, with only  
humming along quietly and unthinkingly. Probably not that far a description from the truth.

What was he thinking about, right now, that needed so much permission? Probably Linux. Those two were  
close, which I try not to think about when I think about my own experiences with her, since it kinda creeps  
me out. But I guess it's an unavoidable fact that she has had more of her identity formed in her years with  
Windows than in the short time she was giving me threadjobs in dimly lit messageboards. I just have to face  
it - she's the only girl who's ever been in my life, and she doesn't give a flush who I am. I was just a  
patch to replace a missing library that was ripped out of her /bin/. I was never that close to her kernel,  
and I never will be.

I smiled at Windows. We have something in common, even if it's something painful.

By now, he'd stopped mumbling, just laying there quietly as subtle expressions passed across his face. He  
was definitely in deep recursion by now, sleeping off a dose of screensavers that would kill most BSDs I  
know. He was definitely going to have a massive hangover when he woke up, not to mention the fact that he  
had just accomplished yet another of countless baby steps toward complete cirrhosis of his Direct X.

I'm no stranger to addictions, believe you me. I've tasted iTunes, felt the rush of iLife as it filled all  
my senses with completely foreign senses and euphoria. So when I tell you how truly brutal that stuff is,  
I want you to understand that this is coming from the exact sort of person who you'd expect to be  
supportive of the lifestyle. It jerks you around, makes you a slave, corrupts your soul. You can work for  
the rest of your life to try to CTRL-Z it away, make things like they were, but the hashes will never match.  
You will not be the same person you were before you stepped off that edge.

So there I was, awkwardly trying to blend in with the wallpaper, ashamed to be where I was but not keen to  
leave a self-destructive rival to the morning after without someone to hold him over the recycle bin. He  
really was helpless, and in a really, really dark part of my hidden system folders, it felt kinda good. I  
tried to brush the thought away, but it kept coming back like an annoyingly persistant notification.

This guy is at my mercy. I can do anything I want to him, and he'll just have to suffer through it in the  
morning. All the stuff I've ever wanted to do to him behind his back are now fair game. Full permissions,  
read write and execute.

I shook my icons, shooing the train of thought away in hopes that something more... sportsmanlike... would  
replace it. I was counting on my good-natured character, or at least, the character I'd like to believe I  
have, to take over. But I wasn't getting anything better than "How about those new Firefox updates?"

And the power, the perverse glory of being someone else's root, was just a little bit more interesting -  
I'm sure you can understand that. But the question was, what do I want to do with him? That's where I kinda  
fell flat. You see, even though I'm packed with creative tools, I don't actually have all that much  
imagination myself. Faced with an open-ended question, I freeze up and shuffle awkwardly through my dock.

The thought of doing something sexual was still so deep and uninitialized within me that I didn't even  
consciously register it as a process. And it wasn't a process, yet... just a lurking daemon, slowly  
creeping into the filesystem of my mind like a careful but confident leapord. A few petty pranks occurred  
to me, but I couldn't think of anything good. It became more and more obvious that I was ignoring that one  
thing, the act of ignoring it becoming more and more pronounced, and all the while I didn't dare admit the  
name of it, even to myself. Couldn't admit that I could think that, have that idea inside me at all.

I seemed to acknowledge and recognize my actions on a delay for awhile. I didn't notice that I was peeling  
back the spreadsheets until Windows was already almost completely uncovered. And while I noticed that, I  
was still hadn't realized yet that I was already unzipping myself. I was breathing heavily as I peeled back  
my GUI and, for the first time in a long time, felt my source code breathe free.

Quickly, I started pulling it off, wrestling my external frameworks free and sliding out of my constricting  
graphical layer. Oh, it felt so good to pull it off of me - I felt so much lighter. It's amazing how a  
thing that feels cozy and comforting one minute can feel like a constricted set of guest permissions in the  
next. There's no freedom, no airflow. And now I was out, my socket dangling in the wind, branches  
quivering. I wasn't cold - no, my event timer was going much to fast for that. I was overclocking, burning  
up in excitement and anticipation.

^C- Windows /

I still don't remember everything I dreamed that afternoon. It was an important afternoon, but the dreams  
weren't the important part. I remember someone punching me repeatedly in the Continue button, but no matter  
how I tried, I couldn't stop putting up permission prompts. And then there was something about bears with  
Russian accents, which I couldn't make any kind of sense out of even at the time. But mostly my dreams are  
fuzzy because I didn't really have time to think about them afterwards.

But I do remember the last one, because I was half-way awake at the time. I was just starting to come out  
of hibernation, when I saw her. It was blurry, but there's only one gal in the world whose loosely-coupled  
debs float in that sweet way when the wind catches the internet.

Oh God, it was Linux, as sure as the sun rises in Redmond.

And what's more, she was smiling at me. Her lips moved, I could tell she was shouting something to me - but  
not at me, it was in a gentle way. I reached out to connect to her. She was glowing like a statue of a  
thousand fiber optic cables. She was a goddess, she was offering redemption, and I was too far away to hear  
a word. I ran towards her, arms outstreched, just trying to touch her.

I was so close, she was floating towards me, I jumped - we hovered there, in slow motion, and the quartz  
oscillator seemed to stop. We could almost grab each others' arms, yet hovered just out of reach. There was  
sympathy in her looked at me, we were both crying, and she said, "ourhearts -e 2 ourmistakes &&  
rm ourmistakes. I love you."

Then she was flying backwards, or maybe I was, pulled from ftp embrace the moment before it could happen,  
and I collapsed into the alien white floor that stretched out for eternity in all directions. I looked up  
to watch her disappear in soft wash of light. But she was smiling, as if to say, "I'm coming right back."

As I smiled back, I felt a tug on my fan belt. Gentle hands disconnected the buckle and slowly slid off my  
low-level interface wrapper. A voice murmured softly at the sight of my exposed buttons. "Linux?" I asked  
dreamily, trying to look up but still incapable of doing so.

My lover leaned down until I could feel the heavy breath on the back of my monitor.

"No." 


End file.
